LONDON, 1 December 2003 — The National Assembly Against Racism has demanded the resignation of Labour MP and Minister for Europe Denis McShane for his anti-Muslim remarks.
Referring to his speech in Rotherhamand asking Muslims to “make a choice” between terrorism and the “British way” of peaceful and democratic progress, the group has in a resolution submitted to the National Assembly Against Racism expressed its solidarity with the Muslim community over McShane’s attack.
“We utterly reject as racist the notion that a community and its organizations be required to take collective responsibility for what particular individuals have done - in this particular case acts of individuals from another country in a different country. We reject as racist stereotyping of Muslims as potential terrorists, as people who need to make a choice of rejecting terrorism. We believe that his remarks, in their hard or ‘soft’ form (the hard form is very much in the public domain on the front pages of newspapers) gives succor directly to the British National Party who use Islamaphobia as a key weapon to build support,” the group said.
“Perhaps McShane has forgotten that many Muslims in this country are from countries that had a somewhat different experience of the ‘British way’ and have recently seen the government’s dedication to peaceful means as demonstrated over Baghdad and Basra. But, of course, the ‘British Way’ means that bombs dropped form the air, whatever the number of people they kill, do not count as terrorism.”
The group contended that McShane’s “arrogant” remarks were on the front pages alongside pictures of the bombings in Turkey. “No matter that the majority of victims were Muslims, this kind of demand addressed to British Muslims amounts to a ‘terrorist’ smear attributing collective responsibility for distant events to an entire community — exactly the same thinking demonstrated by the synagogue bombers.”
